Sohonet Delivers Cloud for Rendering
Sohonet has signed on to IBM Cloud’s SoftLayer IaaS platform to provide its extensive network of film and media companies with the compute and storage resources they need.

Additionally, SoftLayer CTO Marc Jones recently met with members of the European press during a recent visit to Germany, France, and the U.K. Click here to read some of the key stories covering his visit.

The other day everything was going so well – I woke up in a fantastic mood, ate a great lunch, accomplished all of my work for the day, and left on time! I was thrilled that my day went so well, then a catastrophic failure occurred. I walked out to my car grabbed my keychain from my pocket and found that my car key was gone. My only car key! This scenario can happen not just with car keys, but can happen with your server and data as well. Redundancy can give you peace of mind and save you from an expensive mistake like I made with my car. The worst part is that I could have easily prevented this scenario by just having a backup key. Some good practices to provide redundancy are listed below:

1.Redundant backups – If you have a backup to a local disk it is good to have an offsite backup or a storage solution backup so that way you have a redundant way to recover in the event something catastrophic occurs.

2.Redundant DNS – You can run your own DNS server and use our secondary DNS service or even setup another DNS server for failover.

3.Raid Arrays – Having a raid array such as raid 1, raid 5 or raid 10 gives you an extra added level of protection with your drive’s data (this is no substitution for backups just added protection).

4.Failover – An example of this being a production server. If the server fails there is another server setup and ready to take its place. This can be done manually or with our services such as our hardware load balancer or Netscaler solutions.

5.Contact information – In the event you are unable to be reached it is a good idea to have someone else available to make contact with us to address support issues etc.

By following some of these practices you can avoid encountering issues that are generally avoidable and that would cost you a lot of downtime and headaches. I know I have learned from my key mistake!